March 31st, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • Leave a Comment
THE DAY JAM MASTER JAY DIED
woke unsure how to pay rent
check hadn’t come in from county
too many months living like artist
with no net to break the fall
went to my brother’s class at Kelvyn Park
taught Luis Rodriguez in freshman honors
two poems about neighborhood folk / one
heroin-addicted guitar player and the other
man angry in Humboldt Park killing a car
gave a reading at Wright College
theater full of aging teens and faculty
after the set this skinny white kid comes over
gives me props for a poem about graff writers
i ask if he writes, ELOTES he says
no shit i say i’ve been digging you
for years over red and brown line tracks
first seen you up on that truck at Chicago
and Halsted / that’s me he said
ate with Eboo downtown near Loyola
he lectures to a class of grad students
about discovery and inheritance / he is brilliant
in describing our engagement with modernity
we encounter the vastness of cultural practice
and build bridges back home he says
i think of Isabel / young writer at Kelvyn Park
Bindi between her eyebrows / picture of Lady Guadalupe
in her notebook / she reads the Bhagavad Gita in Spanish
with her Aunt who teaches Yoga at the Church
and i tell this class my path back to Judaism
was paved in breakbeats
walk to the train
get home / call my girl
she lives in Brooklyn
on my bed / she tells me
Jam Master Jay was shot
his head spilled onto the control panels
of his studio in Queens
it’s fucked up she said
it’s fucked up i said
said we’d talk tomorrow
hung up and my apartment was silent
like there was no music in my apartment
my apartment was silent like my childhood
memories silenced tonight like the music
-eulogy-
Chuck D said John Lennon was killed today
and i miss Pac and Big more than ever
i am Holden Caulfield watching hope break in the stalls of public bathrooms
i am Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth reminiscing over the fallen body of b-boy
Trouble T-Roy and dying hip-hop birth sites falling wayside to the pounding beats
of green-fisted real estate agents and the hard crack rock drug wars america wages
on her children creating culture with turntables
we have been here before
and i want Scott La Rock back to break up all this violence
i want Big L to throw a peace sign up in the air and DREAM
and Ramon and all the other graffiti artists killed in the line of their calling
to come back and bomb the World Trade Center
with the biggest streaked wildstyles the sky has ever seen:
a mural for the forgotten spray painted on the clouds
a gold chain cast across the sun
a single shell toe held up in the air
it was Jam Master Jay who introduced me to the culture
who soothed me over the bridge of whiteness and rock
it was his cool lean arms wrapped around chest / head back
in black fedora / no laces in his adidas / he stole electricity
to light the block parties / reparations / for all the stars exploded
before he could play the last song they requested / he’d send shine
beams on vinyl / into the distant homes of the sun starved
and let us bask in his light scratching scarce sounds / found
digging the landfills / of america’s sonic consciousness
it’s not bad meaning bad but bad meaning
it’s not bad meaning
it’s not bad meaning
it’s not
–from Rattle #27, Summer 2007
Tribute to Slam Poetry
March 30th, 2009
Link • E-Reviews • Leave a Comment
Review by L.J. Sysko
UNDID IN THE LAND OF UNDONE
by Lee Upton
New Issues Poetry & Prose
Western Michigan University
1903 W. Michigan Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5463
ISBN 1-930974-72-8 / 978-1-930974-72-2
2007, 81 pp., $14.00
http://www.wmich.edu/~newissue/
Lee Upton is lucky she is a poet over 40-years-old. If she were any younger, she would have been anointed the Voice of Generation X because her latest book, Undid in the Land of Undone, gives voice to the ambitious ambivalence and outlandish irony of those born between 1965 and 1980. Alas, Upton is more mature, more accomplished, and more poised to speak— full-throated and craftily— the truth as she sees it than any Gen X’er could. And so we are lucky. This is a book for those of us who have lived long enough to look backward and forward with equal parts forbearance and chagrin. Lee Upton’s poems manage the winsome trick of vacillating between wildly diverse subjects and tones—from indictment of others to self-implication, from the wily to the vulnerable, from classical allusion to pop references—the reader cannot escape the sense, while strolling this gallery of Upton’s mid-life masterpieces, that she has entered the mind of an extravagantly intelligent big sister with an ax or two to grind.
Lee Upton is the author of nine books, a published writer of fiction as well as poetry, and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Undid in the Land of Undone is her fifth book of poetry. She is a recipient of the National Poetry Series Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award. For two excellent poems that appear in Undid in the Land of Undone, Upton was presented with awards by The Poetry Society of America in 2005. The Lyric Poetry Award was given for “And though she be but little, she is fierce,” a poem whose title is taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Award judge Susan Wheeler wrote of the poem, “It seems to put no foot in the wrong place…and makes sparkling comparisons, both apt and unexpected. Though it be modest, the poem be steel.” The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, judged by Mark Doty, was given for “Dickinson’s Day Lilies,” a poem that amplifies the moment in Emily Dickinson’s life when she met her erstwhile editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
March 29th, 2009
Link • Announcements, E-Reviews • Leave a Comment
Once again, here’s how our review process works: If you’d like to review any of these books or literary journals (or any from the full list), let us know, and we’ll mail it to you. Write a review of at least 600 words, and if we publish it, we’ll also send you the forthcoming copy or any back issue of Rattle as payment. Free books and a free magazine, just for doing a bit of service to the good of poetry.
The list is long this month, so don’t hesitate to ask for several books at once.
To request any of these books, just write to:
New books in March:
- Jamey Hecht – Limousine, Midnight Blue
Michelle Boisseau – A Sunday in God-Years- David Lee Garrison – Sweeping the Cemetery
- Mitchell L.H. Douglas – Cooling Board
- Ching-In Chen – The Heart’s Traffic
- Margo Klass & Frank Soos – Double Moon
- David James – She Dances Like Mussolini
- Mignon Ariel King – The Woods Have Words
- Ernest Loesser – Touched by Lightning
- Louis Phillips – The Kilroy Sonata
- Orlando White – Bone Light
- Jim Natal – Memory & Rain
- Louis Phillips - The Woman Who Wrote “King Lear”
- Carine Topal – In the Heaven of Never Before
- Christopher Goodrich – Nevertheless, Hello
- Elizabeth Biller Chapman – Light Thickens
- Irene McKinney – Unthinkable
Ernest Hilbert – Sixty Sonnets- Tullio Pironti – Books & Rough Business
Craig Santos Perez – from Unincorporated Territory- Jennifer Kronovet – Awayward
- Louis Simpson – Struggling Times
* = chapbook
# = uncorrected proof (i.e., softcover
books w/o cover art; may be typos)
Literary Magazines:
- Arts & Letters – 21
- First Class – 32
- Arkansas Review – 39.3
- Alaska Quarterly Review – 25.1-2
- Alaska Quarterly Review – 25.3-4
March 29th, 2009
Link • Poems • Leave a Comment
Michelle Bitting
THE SACRIFICE
I think about how you stayed up nights, Mother,
drinking coffee at your sewing machine.
The time you never went to bed
finishing my Isadora Duncan costume—
diaphanous number cut from a swell of black crepe
for the mad-grief dance after her children accidentally drowned.
Remember waking to find the garment realized—
dark offering you draped across the ironing board,
the fastidiously stitched seams that stroked
my just-coming curves so I’d be beautiful,
drunk in the lights of my junior high stage,
and you out there in the hushed cool of your reserved seat,
hands folded, resting now, the little bobbin of your heart
spinning inside its quiet nook while you watched me
do the hard, privileged work of feeling for both of us.
–from Rattle #27, Summer 2007
March 28th, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • 5 Comments
TRISHA ORR: “These paintings were generated in response to an invitation to collaborate with my husband, the poet Gregory Orr, for an exhibit entitled ‘Love Letter Invitational’ at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. The exhibit consisted of collaborative works done by writers and artists on the subject of ‘love.’ Greg and I had been asked to work in collaboration twice before, and each time he’d written poems based on my still life paintings. This time, we decided to reverse the process, so I would make paintings in response to his poems. I decided to incorporate the text of the poem or portions of the text into the painting. I used loosely constructed grids and tried to find the color and light and weight of the words in each poem. I wanted the language to be legible, but I reconfigured the line breaks to make compositions that were visually balanced. The texts of the paintings come from Greg’s two most recent books, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved.”
Click the image to view a larger version:
–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
Tribute to Visual Poetry
